Art Style: Intersect

a.k.a. Digidrive

Source // Nintendo

The Art Style series is back, or is it the bit Generations series? Either way, we're in for more utterly abstract gaming on the go with Art Style: Intersect, a game that involves... Uhm...

Probably better to just try and work it out as we go along.

Frustrations

As a DSiWare title, it's a little tricky for me to get the latest version of Intersect, the one we should actually play, according to the 1001 list, but it did have an older, easy to emulate Japanese version on the Game Boy Advance known as Digidrive.

Neither Intersect nor Digidrive really tells you what on Earth is happening in-game, however, so do try your best to pick out some mechanics and do tell me what I was even doing if you work anything out.

On the left is a sort of road intersection, with arrows coming at you from all four angles. When they reach a screen edge, they stop, and when like-coloured arrows line up, they turn into buckets of potential energy or something.

Your d-pad influences which way an arrow will move when it arrives at the intersection, so you can spit out the traffic in one of three directions to fill up some buckets, or something.

After a short while, new red arrows rock up and get into a friendly fight with the black arrows. If you've been filling up a road with black arrows, but miss diverting a red to another road, it'll knock your black arrows out of the way and you'll now be filling up your bucket with red arrows instead.

They're functionally the same. Just get things that look alike to line up in a row and you're good.

Do all of that well enough and the disc on the right gets propelled up the measuring tape like it's a curling ball sliding down the ice. Are they called balls in curling? Anyway, it's important to do well and move this disc, because below it is a mangler that will destroy it if it gets to close.

And that's the game of Intersect/Digidrive.

There's probably more to it than that. My triangles turned into squares, and at one point I caught a glimpse of a pentagon. Some white arrows came along to do whatever it is they are doing there. I even had two squares in the same segment at one point, and absolutely could not tell you how or why.

So long as the disc kept getting launched up the side of the screen, the details don't matter.

They all got faster and more chaotic and I didn't know what I was doing and that was that, after five minutes.

Final Word

Intersect is a game, certainly. A puzzler, I can say for sure. A good one? Well, it's a different one, isn't it?

It looks simple, there's not a whole lot of inputs to learn - unless there actually are, and I've been limiting myself an awful lot. At the end of the day though, I'm not really bothered if I've been playing it wrong. It's a little too abstract and pointless for me.

With Art Style: Orbient, you've a gravity-based puzzler that you can dive into and have a good time. Here, you've a weird puzzle game with no real purpose other than understanding the puzzle and then doing well at it.

That might appeal to some, but to me, this was just something to do and write about while the next game on the 1001 list was downloading in the background.

Fun Facts

This was the only game in the bit Generations series to not be developed by Skip Ltd.

Art Style: Intersect, developed by Q-Games, first released in 2009.

Version played: Digidrive, Game Boy Advance, 2006, via emulation.